Full Transcript
[Music] Welcome to the Solspace Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Mitchell: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Solspace Podcast. Today we're talking about accessibility with John Henry Donovan. John Henry's been on the Solspace team for, hey John Henry, how many years?
John Henry: Five or six years now, I think.
Mitchell: Ah, it feels like longer than that. Maybe because we've been through the trenches on several difficult projects, it makes us age more.
We're going to talk about accessibility today, and in the last couple of years, I know you've done a deep dive into the topic, taken a keen interest in it. And on several client projects, you've done really intensive work on improving the accessibility level on some of our client sites. And I'm thinking in terms of our primary contacts and clients out there are marketing directors.
They're who reach out to us. They're who first engage us. They're the ones we talk to every week on retainer when we're working on sites and maintaining them and building new stuff.
So, for the marketing directors out there who are now maybe turning their attention to accessibility regarding the website they manage, what are some of the sort of top level things you want them to start thinking about from process to actual detail work that they need to be thinking about doing, how to phase the work, maybe you could get us started on that.
John Henry: Yeah. So, it's, it's a recent trend in the past, I'd say three years that clients are actually using the term accessibility. Whereas before we'd bring up the subject of accessibility.
And I think it's more from a legal standpoint as well, where there's legal consequences as well and loss of potential customers if you can't provide an accessible website. So, it's definitely a new topic for a lot of these marketing creatives and people that come to us. And of course, it's pretty much essential to have an accessible website because you want to promote the inclusiveness, the equal access to information and resources for all users, regardless of their abilities.
So, you also have more benefits that by doing that, you can also improve search engine optimization, increase your user engagement and just provide a better overall user experience. So, making the website accessible can fall under a number of things. It could be a matter of compliance with the laws and regulations. It could also be like a more than ethical responsibility to ensure that all the users can participate in your website.
So, when we start with some comes to us for accessibility and it's never, they never really come to us for accessibility. It's always new developments or maybe a migration of one CMS to another one.
We, we try to talk to them about building accessibility into the project. So, our approach to accessibility is that it's a journey. There's no one click button for accessibility. It's not a short process. It would be a long process, but we never want to retrofit accessibility if we're approaching a big project. We'd like to build it into that journey.
We'd like to train and teach and educate our clients about the accessibility that it's not, doesn't all fall to our responsibility, but responsibilities lie with themselves, their designers, creatives, their content creators. And that journey is ongoing and the way that they learn about accessibility as well. So usually, the steps we take for new clients for planning and managing accessibility, it's a pretty general approach.
So, the first thing we do, if they have an existing website and don't have a website at all, is to conduct an accessibility audit. So, what an audit involves is reviewing the current website and identifying any accessibility barriers. And we use a number of tools like this to some third-party tools.
And we use some of Google's tools and a number of things to do an audit. There is a more, some kind of SaaS services perform audits for you. They can get quite expensive. And there's also upsells to continuous monitoring and stuff of the tools that they have as well.
But our initial accessibility audit is a fairly low key one, with just a general good review of the website, identifying the kind of key things that we want to address on the website. And after presenting this to the client, we might develop an accessibility plan, and that's based on the findings from the audit mainly. So, we want to address any identified barriers, ensure that the new development adheres to any accessibility guidelines. Now, in speaking with that, I'm not an expert in accessibility.
I know a lot about accessibility, but I'm always learning about accessibility. So even for me, it's a journey as well. But I mightn't be the only developer in Solspace working on your project. We could have a number of developers on the team and their skill level with accessibility would also range from no skill to a high skill in accessibility.
So part of our journey as well as educating internally with our other developers and providing tools for them, that they can keep their accessibility code, the way that they develop the website, the way to develop designs for the website, that we're always keeping accessibility in mind, because there's nothing worse than going back to scratch on a design, especially in terms of it comes to color contrast and things and guidelines for that and having to redo things like that.
Speaking of guidelines, there is web accessibility guidelines. They're not rules. So, there is the web content accessibility guidelines, which it is. You can say it a number of ways.
You can say wuh-kag, you can say W C A G, or you can say W kag. Whatever you want to say it. There's also section 508 standards, and they basically ensure that the website's accessible to users with disabilities.
With the WCAG, if someone came to you and they said they want to meet this certain criteria for WCAG. So, you basically get a version of their guidelines. So up until recently, the latest version was 2.1. And I think recently they have 2.2. So, either one is fine. 2.2 is the latest one. And you might've heard the letter A. That's different.
There's A, double A and triple A after the version guidelines. So, you'd get WCAG 2.1 and you'd have A, double A or triple A. And they're different standards.
And they basically, you need to adhere to, they have more strictness around them in the number of A's that they have after it. So, what we generally say is your A is something that you must do for accessibility. Double A would be something you should do.
And then triple A is kind of like reaching for the stars. That's very hard to achieve. So, what we generally aim for is WCAG 2.1 or 2 and double A. And that would be our kind of standard in-house that we would aim for in terms of accessibility standards. So, the types of projects that we get, we either do the design in-house or a client may have their own in-house designer. If they have their own in-house designer, we want to be in contact with designer. We want to be talking with designer. Making sure they're aware of accessibility. They may have a brand manual already.
They may have brand guidelines. They may have taken all this into account already, but color plays a big part in accessibility, especially contrast, font sizes and things like that. And a lot of cases, their brand guidelines have only been developed for print. Or they may have a new brand guideline. They may be using one of these new tools like Figma to design their brand but might not have taken accessibility into account.
So, a lot of this initial conversation, it would be reviewing those guidelines as well and identifying problems with them because what works for print mightn't work for the web and you might fail an accessibility guideline just on contrast alone. Say if you had white text on a very bright red and it was too small. This would be a problem. So, a lot of what we do is compromise between like a creative director with any creatives in-house and coming up with a suitable compromise on color contrast where there might be slight variations in color for the web, but that then becomes your brand web guideline in-house for that company as well. And it's something that they can fold back into their own guidelines in-house.
So that's probably where most pushback we get from clients is or say where the CEO is in love with their logo on a certain color or like the background color of a nav, but we may have to tweak that slightly. So, to the initial layman, it may look exactly the same as it does in print on screen, but there's going to be slight differences just to pass those accessibility guidelines and work with the assistive technology. So, a lot of people get sidetracked with, Oh, we need to pass the Google PageSpeed.
We need to pass the accessibility audit. We need to pass all of these things where at the end of the day, what you're actually doing is you're preparing your site for assistive technology. So, it doesn't really matter about those reports. I mean, you need to pass them, but don't get caught up with them. At the end of the day, it's the end user using that technology that you need to ensure that there's compatibility and accessibility for people with disabilities.
Other things that we bring to a client is we talked about training employees. So, anyone working on the website, we kind of feedback information, how to train for web accessibility and how to create accessible content. So, in most cases we create, we'd use a content system manager, something like craft CMS or WordPress or any of those things. But at the end of the day, when our job finishes and they start adding content, a lot of times we don't have control over the content that they add. We can put enough guidelines in place that it will adapt the contents for accessibility, but in-house employees need to be also trained on how to create accessible content. The one of those things is like, for example, how to write titles, adding alt text for images, how to describe an image that's been added to the website. Maybe we might build in AI to identify what’s the subject of the image and use that in the website as well.
But if you're adding videos and stuff, if you're using a third-party service like YouTube or Vimeo or Wistia, I think is another one, that all of these kind of need to have closed captions, transcripts, audio descriptions for all the multimedia content on the website. Now, if you have a very media heavy site with clients with hundreds of thousands of images, with clients with hundreds, thousands of videos, that's no mean feat. So again, it's a journey.
It's deciding which of those high performing pages that you have on the website on Google, which of those gets most traffic and maybe making a plan to convert those pages as the first protocol for making all those images accessibility friendly, making all those videos accessibility friendly and starting there. And then they create an internal plan in-house and they work their way through the content on the website. So, the other thing is the testing with assistive technology.
So, there's a number of tools online as well that we use to test. A lot of the kind of monitoring and stuff does this anyway. There's usually a last thing that we write, which I think is required in a few companies is to write an accessibility statement, this is kind of like a privacy policy of terms and conditions, but you want to develop an accessibility statement. There's no kind of cookie cutter accessibility statement out there. You want to make it very in context with the clients. So basic accessibility statement is that the site follows to this guideline.
You're WCAG to this version 2.1 or 2.2, and you're reaching for AA standard on this. You acknowledge that there are still issues with some of the site, but it's a journey for you and that you're continually correcting this and that you're making the effort to do this. And that's basically the kind of theme of an accessibility statement. And it can be updated as the site matures as well in terms of accessibility. And that's basically the kind of approach that we take for new clients, old clients, obviously a new client with who wants to create a new website or maybe move to new CS can be easier because we have the time to, before we start any work to ask all these questions, to teach the clients, all of these things, and just make them more conscious that all of these things are possible as well.
Mitchell: A lot of what you described means you're sort of building a commitment to accessibility into the entire team and company that connects to the website.
John Henry: That's exactly what it is. And that's what you're kind of striving for. And you don't even have to say it out loud.
The clients usually recognize that after a lot of these interactions with us and even well into the, when it comes to training employees, they actually recognize like this is actually, this is a commitment. This is a big commitment.
So, this isn't like we do it. We say goodbye to Solspace. We got our shiny new site that this, we have to continue this commitment.
Mitchell: So top-level management has to be engaged with this because this is time and money. And it's, it's devoting resources to this that could be devoted to some other activity, some other revenue-generating work on the website. How often do we see that level of cooperation and sort of sponsorship among our clients?
Is that something that's difficult to come by or what, what's the story there?
John Henry: It's already half the battle when they come asking you for accessibility, because they've obviously been told that their site needs to be accessible and stuff. So, we can educate them on that. But if it's up to us to broach the subject of accessibility, the first question is always going to be, well, what's that going to cost?
So, when we develop a website, we kind of build it with accessibility in mind anyway. So, if they didn't want to go for the audit, the plan and stuff like that, a lot of us as developers would write our code with accessibility in mind anyway, but that's just a very small part of it. You're only reaching the first, the first town in your journey, just by us creating standard code. It needs to be everything else involved from that. There's other tools as well. I think one tool that a couple of clients use is called Siteimprove, which also does a lot of things, but it looks after all your digital content.
It goes to your website and checks for spelling, grammar, continuity with your content, it does all that, but also as a whole accessibility package as part of it as well, and monitors your website for pages and stuff. So, say for example, Solspace finished the job, they fell in love with their website, they would continue to use this and they would get reports of accessibility where a lot of it, it would cover a lot of content. And so, if it was something technical, it would be something that maybe we do in a retainer plan or something like that.
But if it was to do with content, like a content editor might've created a new blog post or create a new page on the website and everyone would be unaware that there's something wrong with this page. And suddenly the accessibility is failing on that page. But what Siteimprove does is it brings this to your attention, sends you reports, sends you digests, tells you how many pages you have on your website and identifies, oh, there's four new issues on this page here.
And you can go back, it tells you exactly where it is on the page, tells you how to address it. And you can go back to your content editor then and ask them to make changes.
Mitchell: The, these marketing director clients who make up most of our primary contacts on our engagements, they're always having to deal with multiple requests from different departments and different parts of leadership. Priorities have to be juggled. For them, in order for something to get attention, there needs to be some urgency. So, at the top of the podcast, you said regarding accessibility, you might choose to take on the challenge of making a website accessible because you want to serve your users better.
In some cases, you want to avoid lawsuits. Tell me more about the urgency that some of these marketing directors are dealing with. If top-level management is going to turn their attention to this and devote money and time, where is the fire being lit to make that happen?
John Henry: Yeah, I suppose the biggest one, yeah, is the legal thing. Famously, the Australian Olympic website that got sued years ago of all websites to, to get sued over not being accessible for people with disabilities. That was the most famous case, but it's happening a lot more.
And it's happening from individuals with disabilities, suing the website. So, from a legal point of view, I suppose marketing teams could team up with legal teams inside the company and bring this as our, bring this together to your CEO, kind of fighting back. We're not just talking about titles here.
We're talking about people and personalities and stuff, and the way that they approach their work as well. So, it's our, our conversation with any client is always going to be adapted for what the type of person is, what they currently understand about it. What we learn about their internal management, whether for example, their CEO likes to stand over all the work, whether the CEO is easy to, to deal with, whether the marketing director has all the power to do everything.
We try and identify those kinds of red flags in the, in the beginning, and then we change our conversation geared towards helping them, because we want them to succeed. So, whoever's coming to us, the marketing director, we want them to be successful. So, we'll work with them to get their conversation right when they are bringing this, like if they're going back to their CEO and say, we need to discuss this accessibility, I think it's worth the extra money to kind of go down this road, just prevent any legal implications, just provide access for people with disabilities. We'll help them with that conversation.
It's not all up to them. We want to give them the tools. So, we'll give them the conversation. We'll give them language to use. We'll explain everything that we need to explain and give them the tools to go back and talk to the powers that be. Some cases it's, it's never going to work, but we've been pretty successful so far. And that's down to the marketing person or the person who's in charge of the project.
Mitchell: So, let's imagine that the journey starts because upper level management says, all right, well, I certainly don't want to get sued. So, let's do what we must do this quarter to mitigate that risk.
Can you give me some examples of some of the other things that should be worked on?
John Henry: So, what I talked about already with color contrast and making small changes in color contrast, working with designer to make small changes there. But a lot of things that you see commonly that you'll fail on like Google Pageview reports and stuff are if you have like a blog list in your home page, and after every listing, it says read more or learn more or any of those common phrases, you actually get marked down for that. Because that means nothing to someone with disability who's using assistive technology, because it's not going to read back what learn more means. So, it needs to be in context of what you're actually clicking the button for. So, if you have a blog post and the title is called our new website, there's a summary and there's a link saying learn more. It doesn't mean anything.
But if you add descriptive text into that link saying click here to learn more about our new blog post, then that goes a long way with helping that. Like if imagining the site as a skeleton, and you're seeing all these learn more links on the page would mean nothing to like a robot reading out all of those links on the page.
So, you got to think about descriptions and stuff. So those initial low-hanging fruit things, doing work on the language of your website, those small color changes, making sure that site works on mobile, even adding alt tags to your images. So, they're not just like, if you roll over an image, the alt tag isn't just a random number from a stock image that you downloaded, that you're actually describing what's in the image.
So that's one of the biggest mistakes is that you might have a title that the image would be the same title as the blog post you're using it on or page you're using it on. Whereas for, if you're thinking with someone with a visual disability, they want their screen reader to read out what's actually on the image. So, if it's like a girl with a red dress and a tree, you don't want the title of the image to be our new blog post.
You want it to be, there's a girl standing in the foreground with a red dress or red hair standing in front of a tree in a field. You want your alt text to describe the image. And depending on the CMS you use as well, AI is becoming kind of more mainstream and stuff.
I've used some AI plugins and stuff with content management systems, which will use a kind of a third-party service. They will look at the image and they will actually write that description for you, can approve or edit it. And they save you like, there'll be cost involved, but not extortionate money, but you're saving people the difference between hiring a copywriter or hiring an intern or something to write those things is a big difference. So yeah, there's a lot of things that you can do. Menu items as well, making sure that the titles for all your menu items are correct, that like links again, that they all have labels for your links.
That action buttons on your website, like submit and any forms and that, that the forms are probably the biggest migraine for developers because you're working with form designs and you're also working with accessibility. So even simple things of if your form on your website says under title of your form, it would say required fields. And then there'd be like a required text underneath all the fields and stuff. If that's a high contrast color, like red or something that that's going to fail in accessibility text. It needs to be the same color as the form.
Hiding the labels on your form. So, some people like to make their forms vertically and their design a lot shorter. And if they hide all their labels on their form, then assistive technology isn't going to be able to read what the labels of the form is. Now there's ways of adding that hidden into the code to read out the labels of that form and stuff, but a lot of times it's not done. So, like forms is a bug bear in terms of accessibility as well. Whereas you might, their designer might want a very cool looking form and has animation, all that kind of stuff, but it's going to fail accessibility in a lot of cases.
So, we work with their designers, whoever's responsible for those forms as well, to make those accessible as well.
Mitchell: If a website owner just wants to get a first at a glance, hey, how bad is my situation? And I want to do it for free. Is there some tool that you, of the many that you named, is there a favorite?
John Henry: Um, probably the Google PageSpeed would be the, you'll have results back in minutes. I mean, it's an overview, but it would give you..so, Google PageSpeed measures performance, SEO, and also accessibility. So, if you put your website into Google PageSpeed, it will give you a list of all the problems on your website for accessibility.
And remember, a lot of people make the mistake of just putting their homepage into Google PageSpeed. You want to put some of those inner pages as well, like blog posts, marketing pages, your contact page and stuff. It doesn't go over your whole site; it's based on the URL that you put in. So, you want to put in different URLs and test those URLs as well in their website. That'll give you a good idea of how your website is doing, but also may bring up more pain, that your website will be doing pretty bad in performance as well.
Mitchell: Well, John Henry, this was a great overview. We're at time now, but this is exactly what I was hoping for, sort of a general overview for how the people who we work with, the ones who own the websites that we help take care of, the how they start. How they start on this journey. What kind of framework they need to be thinking about. What first things they need to be dealing with. And really, one of the most important things that came out, I think, that you talked about is how our job is to help prepare our, usually marketing director, our client lead, how to have the conversation with those who are going to release budget and make priorities on the website. How to prepare them to say, here's what we need to do, and this is the order, this is the importance, this is where things are urgent, this is how we'll validate and test that the work was good. So, getting that language together is an important part of this.
John Henry: Definitely. And that's our approach to most things in Solspace is the conversation that happens. It doesn't have to be accessibility. It could be new site design. It's that those conversations happen.
Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. Well, John Henry, thank you. I appreciate you doing this, and I'm glad that you invested some time and effort into becoming our in-house accessibility expert. So, thank you for coming on and schooling us on this.
John Henry: Okay. You're very welcome, Mitchell. Thanks.
[Music] You've been listening to the Solspace Podcast.